Hi! My name is Donna Jodhan; Author of audio mysteries, writer, blogger, and a life style specialist. I produce monthly newsletters for a wide audience and I'd like to welcome you to my newsletter for this month.

In my newsletter you will find the following:

Practical tips to enhance your daily life,

Mystery of the month,

From the desk of author Donna Jodhan,

A news flash from author Donna Jodhan,

Author Donna Jodhan's picks of the month.

To learn more about author Donna Jodhan and how you can access her audio mysteries visit http://www.donnajodhan.com and become a supporter of her anti-bullying campaign.

Check out her weekly podcast Take Another 5; a bit of this and a bit of that ranging from recipes to technology, mystery moment to in the end zone with the entrepreneur, and scam alerts to building awareness on bullying. Available for download from http://www.takeanother5.com and from iTunes.

Section: Practical tips to enhance your daily life:

Welcome to our varied collection of links for your reading pleasure. They are meant to help you keep up with improvements and enhancements to various products and services that are a part of your daily life.

1. Blindfold Bowling With Friends (iOS, Free with In-App Purchases)

Blindfold Bowling with Friends is a fully accessible audio game that's
similar to the ten pin bowling.

In Blindfold Bowling with Friends, you play against other people via Game Center, or other people in the same room as you.

You throw the bowling ball by either flicking with one finger, or aiming with one finger and flicking, or setting the exact angle with your thumb and forefinger, and then flick. The faster you flick, the faster you throw the ball.

You hear the ball rolling down the alley, and hitting pins. Like real bowling, you can get a strike, or a spare, or even miss completely with a gutter ball. And you can post your high scores to Facebook or Twitter.

2. Blindfold Greeting Card (iOS, Free with In-App Purchases)

A greeting card is created by first selecting a sound effect, and then
recording yourself saying something. After both steps are done, prepare and listen to the card to make sure you like it, and then send the card. Cards can be sent via email, text message, facebook, twitter or any other social networking app that your phone may have.

You can choose from hundreds of sound effects when designing your greeting card.

Blindfold Greeting Card comes with the ability for you to send 10 cards. After those are used up, you can purchase upgrades for create and send more cards.

3. Boop Light Detector (iOS, Free)

Boop is an app to detect levels of light and interpret this information with sound. It allows its blind and visually impaired users to detect whether lights are on or off. It covers a broad range of light levels which spans from sensing daylight through open windows to checking whether the indicator light is on for a wifi router.

How to use:

Open app and accept permissions to use camera (first time only)

Point phone towards a light source

Listen and feel as your phone changes tone and frequency of vibration
while getting closer to the light

Only the light level at the center of the camera (directly perpendicular to the phone face) is measured. Pointing the phone directly at the light source will get the highest reading.

Volume control:

Volume control buttons on side of phone control Boop's playback volume

Mute will completely turn off sound

Toggle vibrate on or off manually with the switch at the bottom of the app

4. Castro — Play and Share Podcasts (iOS, US$4.99)

Castro is the ideal app for today’s podcast enthusiasts. There have never been as many great podcasts available as there are now.

Incredible stories, multiple perspectives on news, and diverse opinions are all just a few taps away. Castro is the first app that is designed to help you track a broad range of shows and pick out the episodes that appeal to you. Subscribing to a podcast doesn't have to be a commitment to listen to every episode. You don’t have to choose a narrow few shows and miss out on the rest.

Castro introduces a new concept to support today's broad-minded podcast
enthusiast: triage.

Inbox: Newly published episodes land here. Review the descriptions, queue the best ones and archive the rest.

Queue: A central playlist to plan your listening in advance. Queued episodes are automatically downloaded, and can be re-ordered or archived any time. You can set your favourite shows to queue automatically and use the inbox to triage the rest. This opens the door to expanding your listening habits without overwhelming your play queue.

ALL THESE EXTRA FEATURES

Castro sports an elegant dark mode and well-thought out sleep timer, offering the best in night time podcast listening.

Our "Tentacles" backend server constantly scans for new episodes across every podcast, so your phone doesn’t have to, saving battery life and data usage.

Castro can notify you as soon as episodes are published.

Download and Storage management: Queued episodes are automatically downloaded, so you can focus on deciding what you want to hear and let Castro manage the details.

Fine scrubbing: drag the playhead to scan quickly, or drag the waveform for precision scrubbing.

Beautifully rendered full screen show notes allow you to follow up and explore links of episodes that provide these details.

Rotation support, and big playback controls on the player for easy use while driving.

5. MindNode – Delightful Mind Mapping (iOS, Free)

MindNode makes mind mapping delightful. Mind maps are a visual representation of your ideas, starting with a central thought and growing from there. MindNode allows you to brainstorm, organize & share your thoughts in an intuitive way, so you can focus on the idea behind it. The clean interface lets you concentrate on generating and connecting thoughts, and an infinitely expanding canvas means that no matter how big or complicated your project gets, MindNode can keep up.

MindNode has helped students, artists and project managers to be more
creative with less effort.

Brainstorming — Just Start With Your Ideas

Create new ideas with a tap of your finger

Create multiple mind maps on a self-expanding canvas

Create connections between otherwise unrelated topics

Add photos and stickers to illustrate your ideas

Full VoiceOver support including gestures and other accessibility
features

Organizing – Think Content, not Layout

Simply rearrange your thoughts and hide entire branches to stay on top of your idea

6. Nearby Explorer (iOS, US$79.99)

Nearby Explorer is a full featured GPS app designed for use by people who are blind. Instead of just providing directions, it describes the environment in ways comparable to reading signage or observing road characteristics.

It uses onboard maps, so a data connection is not required, but if you have one, Nearby Explorer supplements the on board map data with crowd collected locations from Foursquare or Google Places. It includes complete maps for the United States and Canada which contain millions of points of interest.

The onboard maps are over 4GB in size, so be sure the device you plan to use has enough available space before purchasing.

Nearby Explorer works with any device running iOS version 9 or later, but if the device does not contain its own GPS receiver, like most iPads and iPods, you must use an external GPS receiver. All iPhones contain GPS receivers.

Nearby Explorer works by letting you select from several different location related options about what to announce as you move. These include both typical items like street name and address and specialized options like approaching streets, intersection configurations, and nearby places and the distance and direction to them. (All announcements are optional.) All of
this information is shown on the home screen and is available at any time, but typical use is to adjust the level of announcements, then lock the screen and put the device away. This keeps both hands free and let's your preferred voice speak the characteristics of the environment as you move.

You may also use the devices position and orientation to obtain additional targeted details such as pointing the end of the device to scan for businesses, even in a moving vehicle, or tilting it vertically to function as a compass, including a listing of streets in the indicated direction.

This all works with the device locked, so one need not fuss with the touch screen while moving. You may even mark a point, then use the position of the evice to get haptic feedback about that point's location.

Nearby Explorer includes a transit feature that provides detailed mass transit schedules for over 60 metropolitan areas in the U. S. and Canada. It treats transit stops just like favorites and points of interest by announcing their name and relative position as you move, but in addition, transit stops add next vehicle stop time, direction of travel, and route name to the announcements. You can use the transit schedules to look up times or even follow a route.
You may virtually move to any area in the U.S. or Canada and explore the road network, search, or use the transit maps for that area.

Pocket Recorder has been created with speed and ease of use in mind. Many applications can be very difficult to navigate for Visually Impaired users, but Pocket Recorder’s menus are very comprehensive and graphics have been minimalized to ensure swift navigation for users with screen reading. We have designed this application to be fully accessible with Voiceover so users can also benefit from using any Voiceover compatible braille display.

Use of a Braille display enhances navigation and allows quick naming of files. We highly recommend using the application with a good pair of headphones to prevent any Voiceover speech from being recorded and to remain incognito in whatever environment you find yourself in. Link your Dropbox account to automatically upload recordings to your other devices!

We hope you find Pocket Recorder to be a useful and effective tool for capturing those moments you need to remember!

9. Scout Legend (iOS, Free with In-App Purchases)

Scout Legend is a game for people who enjoy the world of scouting, hiking, fishing, camping and scout uniform dress-up and would like to have fun playing together and unite into scout units.
To start you need to choose a character to play, then make your scout eat every day so you never get hungry and keep your energy level at 30. You earn points for eating if you eat at least one hour after the previous eating.

Another way to earn points is by Scout Actions. There are many choices of camping food and Scout Actions to choose from. Eat everyday to make sure your scout is not hungry, mad or sick. This is the goal of Scout Legend.

Another goal is to purchase all clothes, shoes and hats options so you would be able to change costumes and looks and share it.

Yet another goal of the game is to earn enough points and purchase all available items for all the scenes including the Camp, the Tent and the Beach and all items for the Backpack.

The game is accessible for visually impaired and blind people (VoiceOver).

11. Ulysses (iOS, US$24.99)

Ulysses is your one-stop writing environment on iOS. Whether you’re a novelist, a journalist, a student or a blogger – if you love to write and write a lot, Ulysses gives you a uniquely streamlined toolset, covering every phase of the writing process:

A powerful, yet simple text editor.

A familiar, no-nonsense text library.

A comprehensive and truly flexible multi-format export.

Of course, the heart and soul of a writing app is its editor. And Ulysses is said to have the best text editor in the world. It offers everything you need – from markup to images and footnotes, from links to comments and code – and it still manages to stay completely out of the way. It’s a beautiful and focused experience, which turns writing on mobile into actual fun.

But since Ulysses takes writing seriously, it does not stop at the editor. Its unified library offers unprecedented access to everything you’ll ever write, be it snippets and ideas, be it blog posts or manuscripts. Every text is at your fingertips, and Ulysses perfectly scales from scratchpad to diary to Great American Novels – and to everything in-between.

Best of all, Ulysses offers fully-fledged, no-holds-barred, all-out iCloud sync. Ulysses is available for all your devices, be it iPad, iPhone or Mac, and every device has access to everything and anything you’ll ever write.

Synchronization is simple, seamless and automatic. It neither requires
third-party apps, nor any kind of interaction. If you got iCloud, you got sync.

And once you’re finished, Ulysses transforms your text into beautiful PDFs, web pages, ebooks and Word documents. You can copy as HTML, save as Markdown, and even publish to your WordPress and Medium accounts. Export is as easy as selecting a format, choosing a style, and picking a destination.

12. Yes Chef - Hands Free Recipe Assistant (iOS, Free)

Yes Chef is the hands free cooking app that talks you through recipes, and answers your questions. Use your voice to work through recipes and keep your hands free to make great food! Yes Chef offers over 350,000 recipes -- what will you make today?

From prep to plate, Yes Chef is entirely hands free. With the knife in one hand, all you have to say is, “Chef, let’s get started.” If you’re cooking chili from scratch, Yes Chef may say “Dice the tomatoes.” Once you finish dicing tomatoes, simply say “next step” and the app continues to read the recipe aloud. Yes Chef will guide your cooking to new heights.

THE CONVERSATIONAL KITCHEN

Yes Chef is the first iOS voice-controlled natural language cooking app, making technology less detectable and more useful in the kitchen. If you don’t understand a step in the recipe, you can ask follow up questions, and because the app is hands free, it won’t matter how grimy your fingers are. Our technology allows you to create deep cooking conversations with Yes Chef’s deep learning engine.

THE PERFECT RECIPE

Yes Chef offers over 350,000 recipes! They are searchable by popularity, keyword and filterable by cuisine. Whatever you want to eat, Yes Chef knows a way to cook it.

Put your cookbooks down, and get more active in the kitchen. Time to make it a little easier to prep, master new culinary techniques, and eat new recipes that inspire you.

4) Here is an email program that may replace Outlook Express for those who miss that long-defunct program:https://www.oeclassic.com/

5) A mailing list has been set up for those beta-testing Apple products. Subscribers will have to answer a screening question to prove that they are really testing. To join, send a blank message to:apple-beta-subscribe@damorris.com

8) This new, free iOS navigation app could be useful to many. OverThere lets you point the phone to find out what is nearby, and to mark your own points of interest so you can locate them again:http://www.ski.org/project/overthere

9) iOS 10 has been released, as have updates for the operating systems of the Apple Watch and Apple TV. There are many podcasts and articles related to each of those operating systems on AppleVis:http://applevis.com

Section: Mystery of the month:

This month, I'd like to whet your appetite with a brief description of one of my episodes of my audio mysteries that I have chosen for you. This one is called "Horror in the Foothills" and here is a brief description.

Tom and Marsha Reed had built their dream home; in the beautiful foothills of the countryside.
They had just gotten married and had decided to spend their honeymoon at their new home. They were young, popular, and the darlings of their social circle. However, rumors had started to grow just before their lavish wedding ceremony. Who could have done this horrible deed and why?

Who could have done it?

Was it Troy Reed?He had wanted his brother dead in order to prevent him from inheriting their father's multi million dollar estate.

Was it Jamie Lorca?He had been in love with Marsha Reed and had wanted Marsha to leave her husband for him.

Was it Randal Cain?He was poor and homeless and had happened upon the Reed's home
and had decided to rob and kill them both.

This mystery is all wrapped up in family and marital secrets and both husband and wife are keeping secrets.

The story is gripping and dramatic to the end.

You can purchase this audio mystery for the very affordable price of $2.49 U.S. Each of my audio mysteries costs $2.49 U.S and you can purchase an entire season of 13 mysteries for the very low price of $24.99 U.S.

Donna also produces various other useful posts every Saturday:Helpful monthly tipsHow to make your products and services more accessibleAnd editorials on creating an accessible workplace.Technology related articles each Wednesday and Thursday.http://www.sterlingcreations.com/businessdesk.htm

Section: A news flash from Author Donna Jodhan:

Author Donna Jodhan has started a new feature on her Facebook page and it is all about the promotion of good reading. Each week she promotes two of her favorite authors to her readers and you can learn more by visiting her Facebook page at authordonnajodhan.

It is all about not good reading but the promotion of authors who can fill your reading space with drama, suspense, and terrific mystery.

Check out author Donna's Facebook page then.

Section: Author Donna Jodhan's Picks of the Month:

An interesting fact:Your foot is the same size as the distance between your wrist and elbow.

About the color green!Green colored light is the least used color of light in the process of photosynthesis. Thusly, it is reflected back into our eyes. That is why plants are, for the most part, green.

An interesting fact about Sumo wrestlers:In Japan, letting a sumo wrestler make your baby cry is considered good luck.

About Sea Otters:Sea otters hold hands when they sleep so they don't drift apart.

So what are the most popular fruits among our kids?Yes! It is apples and oranges.

You can follow Author Donna Jodhan on Twitter @author_jodhan or @accessibleworld
Or chat with her on Skype @habsfan0526.Be sure to like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/authordonnajodhan

With very best wishes for nn extra ordinary month of October,Donna J. Jodhan AKA Detective DJ